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Climate change and Sub-Saharan Africa: the role of central banks
No full textClimate change is driving three transformations in the landscape of global finance, with implications for central banks in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). First, pressures on financial institutions related to climate-related physical risks are mounting, with potential to threaten price and financial stability. Second, global and domestic responses to climate change are creating risks and opportunities for SSA economies. Third, the ongoing shift in the global financial architecture toward sustainability could either crowd-out or crowd-in international investment flows to SSA. Uncertainties in each increase the challenges for central banks and supervisors. We find that, without action, the risks outweigh the opportunities. To fulfil their mandates, SSA's central banks are obliged to react; however, the paucity of peer-reviewed evidence hinders the development and execution of appropriate responses. Preparedness is crucial if actions by SSA central banks are to play their part in shifting the balance towards managing risks and grasping opportunities
International trade since the Washington Consensus: the gains and the pains
No full textControversy has always swirled around ‘trade liberalisation’ – and perhaps more so than for any other policy on Williamson’s original Washington Consensus list. Anti-globalisation protests in the 1990s and early 2000s sharpened scepticism of the idea that developing countries could reliably grow if they opened their markets to foreign imports. And two decades later, globalisation remains as divisive as ever. This chapter discusses accumulating evidence that liberalising a nation’s international trade gives rise to substantial aggregate gains and yet also substantial costs of adjustment and displacement. However, the trade-off involved is no different from any other policy change that strives to raise aggregate efficiency. While there are no easy options for policymakers who must balance the gains and pains from trade, lessons from recent research offer tentative recommendations for policymakers who are evaluating the prospects of trade liberalisation and seeking to resolve the tension between aggregate gains and concentrated losses
Labour markets and gender inequality
No full textWide disparities persist in the wages and economic power of men and women in nearly all countries. Women still make different educational decisions to men, are under-represented in high-paying jobs, and suffer the majority of the financial penalty related to having children. Notably, the disproportionate role women play in unpaid work in the home or family businesses more than makes up for the gap in paid work in the labour market, usually leading to less leisure time and possibly lower social prestige. This chapter argues that both justice and efficiency considerations support the case for tackling gender inequalities in the labour market. The chapter reviews evidence on existing disparities, on the mechanisms underpinning them – including related to novel explanations based on group identity and social norms – and on the policies promising to close these persistent gaps
Evaluation framework for health professionals' digital health and AI technologies: evidence-based policy recommendations
No full textFrom connection to optimisation
No full textAt first, the mobile phone seemed like a landline that you could move about with. The advent of the iPhone changed that—enabling mobile messaging but also receiving email, social media, news, games and finance. And in the era of artificial intelligence, the mobile is again taking on a new form. Throughout these radical transformations, the ability to synchronize activities has been key. This is the theme I explore here: how mobile phones affect our experience and management of time. I conclude with the example of how electronic calendars, a ubiquitous feature of mobile devices, foster processes of optimisation
Mining for a 'net-zero age' the changing place of the extractive industries in green futures and implications for a European just transition
No full textExtractive industries are increasingly positioned as central to Europe's low-carbon future, with the mining of critical minerals framed as a key feature of the energy transition. Yet the intensification of mining raises pressing questions about how ambitions for a ‘net-zero age’ intersect with the principles of a just transition. This paper examines the European Union's new industrial policy on critical minerals alongside the contested Skouries gold‑copper project in northern Greece. The study applies discourse analysis informed by theories of the politics of the future, showing how industrial policy does more than regulate supply: it also legitimises extractive expansion by embedding mining within green transition discourses. The analysis demonstrates that visions of the future function as instruments of power that entrench extractivism and risk sacrificing key distributive, procedural and recognition dimensions of justice. In doing so, the paper offers a novel examination of the power of temporality in green discourses and the implications of the EU's mining strategy for just transitions, illuminating the trajectory of Europe's green transition as it reshapes social life in the coming decades
AdaDetectGPT: adaptive detection of LLM-generated text with statistical guarantees
No full textWe study the problem of determining whether a piece of text has been authored by a human or by a large language model (LLM). Existing state of the art logits-based detectors make use of statistics derived from the log-probability of the observed text evaluated using the distribution function of a given source LLM. However, relying solely on log probabilities can be sub-optimal. In response, we introduce AdaDetectGPT – a novel classifier that adaptively learns a witness function from training data to enhance the performance of logits-based detectors. We provide statistical guarantees on its true positive rate, false positive rate, true negative rate and false negative rate. Extensive numerical studies show AdaDetectGPT nearly uniformly improves the state-of-the-art method in various combination of datasets and LLMs, and the improvement can reach up to 37%. A python implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/Mamba413/AdaDetectGPT